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I think it's a) coordination and b) indie game designers aren't very good at designing for a mass audience. Playing Dungeons and Dragons takes understanding a lot of rules, and while nerds are willing to learn lots of rules and may even have fun doing so, most people want to minimize their rule-learning. So they're inclined to learn the rules to the single most popular RPG and never bother spending five hours learning another system that ultimately still gives a similar experience to Dungeons and Dragons.
Secondly, I believe that for some reason Dungeons and Dragons is just more fun for casuals than other games like Pathfinder are. I don't know exactly why, although I can make guesses, but I'm pretty confident it's true. I think it might be that DnD is both decently structured while being easy to play, while most other RPGs are either very complex or very unstructured, either of which are unappealing to casuals. And it achieves this by putting a lot of work on the Dungeon Master and comparatively little on the regular players, so for a group with 1 nerd and 4 casuals, it's a fun experience for everyone.
I mean, Pathfinder is D&D. Pathfinder 1e is just a heavily house ruled version of D&D 3.5e.
I definitely think part of D&D 5e's success has been its relative simplicity, and accessibility compared to past versions of D&D. I'm playing 5e with a former English major, and when we tried to switch to Pathfinder 1e, the increased complexity during character creation was enough to get him to ask the group to just do a 5e campaign.
I have one friend who is a masseuse, who loved the concept of D&D but found the rules overwhelming. She's interested in doing micro-RPG one shots, but feels like she could never do D&D again.
I love Pathfinder but hate character creation. There's already a min-max template out there somewhere, and my gaming group has 1-2 people who have them already memorized. There's no point in bringing an suboptimal build to the table.
The result is I get this ugly mix of spending a couple hours stumbling through building something, doing an 80% good job because I'm not totally stupid but also we've never kept a campaign going past level 5 and the the gaps between each one are long enough that I forget some of the nuances.
Then we show up for our first session and we spend 2 hours adjusting it to one of the templates for the class anyway. Ugh.
Playing is a blast, but I hate the grind of using sub-optimal tools for creation beforehand.
I would say there's no point in min-maxing, and you should stop doing that. Doing that sucks the fun out of any game (not just Pathfinder), so of course you don't have fun with character creation. You can still have just as much fun, if not more fun, with a suboptimal character you built with a fun idea in mind.
I understand what you're saying here - I think it depends on the playgroup.
3 of the dudes in our group can GM reliably. 2 of them are very take-no-prisoners, to the point where we need one to be the player's advocate when the other is GM. You can't really survive in those games if you're doing C-level builds, and if you're B-level you'll spend a lot of time in combat taking cover and not doing much (to say nothing of having the non-combat skills to move things forward).
In a sense my attitude is a reflection of general problems with the group's ability to stick around with long campaigns. A mediocre build can be rectified over many levels and the "fun" element can be fleshed out. They're in a weird space where they get bored once they hit certain levels and so even if they do make the commitment for a long campaign they try to cut it off for something new! Unbelievably cool universes have been left on the table after just 10-15 sessions.
It's still an absolute blast, but it's made the character creation part of the equation the least fun.
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